


Adamant - Five Prompts Version

by cutsycat



Series: Dictionary.Com Word of the Day Drabbles [1092]
Category: NCIS
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Gen, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-12 22:55:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15350571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cutsycat/pseuds/cutsycat
Summary: Tony has always wondered what NCIS was ever since his soulmark revealed itself, but can he find his soulmate and if he does, will it matter?





	Adamant - Five Prompts Version

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TT_Angst_Queen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TT_Angst_Queen/gifts).



> Another dictionary.com word of the day drabble. This time from 04/27/2002 for the word [adamant](http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/2002/04/27/adamant).
> 
> adamant  
> Not capable of being swayed by pleas,appeals, or reason; not susceptible to persuasion; unyielding.
> 
> This is for prompt #5 of the April 2018 Five Prompts Challenge located [here](https://ncis-discuss.livejournal.com/139302.html) which featured an image created by Tardis_Type40 on lj. Thanks Tardis_Type40 for the lovely artwork.
> 
> As always comments, kudos, and constructive criticism are greatly appreciated. I'm not completely happy with this story, but I hope you guys will like it nonetheless.

# 

Adamant - Five Prompts Version

At first, he hadn't noticed, but by the time he was 16, it had grown considerably. You see everyone had a soulmark that in some way indicated who their soulmate would be. Tony was no different. 

Supposedly, when they touched their soulmate for the first time, their mark would change colors. You could tell how deep a person’s bond with their soulmate was by the color of their soulmark. Not that people really got the chance to voyeuristically determine how a couple’s mating progress had gone as most soulmarks were easily covered up and not visible.

Doctors, counselors, and other mental and physical health related physicians were expected to check the soulmark as part of their examinations as sometimes the symptoms a person was displaying were not actually their symptoms, but reflection of whatever their soulmate was going through at the time. For counselors, it was especially important as it gave them a clue as to how badly things had gone awry. It didn’t tell them what was wrong necessarily, but it did give an indication of how quickly treatment needed to be completed.

Now, Tony's soulmark was a little unusual. Most soulmarks were fairly generic and could match to a number of people, making it very difficult for those people to find their soulmates. Tony’s, however, was very specific in that it was the actual NCIS logo.

At 16, Tony had no clue what NCIS actually was, but his soulmark clearly had NCIS as part of it. He’d spent most of his life in a boys’ boarding school and sheltered from most things out in the real world. They were just now getting to the point where the boys were being encouraged to look into and start tailoring their courses for the college that they wanted to apply to when they graduated from the boarding school, which would put them at a little better than a normal high school education.

His father, Anthony DiNozzo, Sr., wanted him to go to a military academy, but Tony was adamant about doing something he enjoyed that would bring him closer to his soulmate. His mother had always told him that soulmates were special. Being curious, he’d asked if Senior was her soulmate.

Tony had been surprised when his mother shook her head. Tony’s curiosity intrigued, he wanted to know who her soulmate was and why they were living with Senior instead of him. She’d patted her lap for Tony to sit. This was when he was about 7 years old, shortly before she died.

Tony hadn’t known that he would lose her at that point in time, however, and he happily settled into her lap to listen to her story. Her soulmate’s name was Rob and she’d met him when she was young and dumb. When they’d realized that they were soulmates, they’d quickly married as a draft was going on and Rob would be drafted soon.

They’d had a few weeks of wedded bliss before Rob received his draft letter. It had been enough time for her to become pregnant with their child. 

“Me?” Tony asked.

“Yep. That was you, baby.” She’d replied before continuing her story. 

Unfortunately, that was the last she saw of Rob. She’d received his effects in the mail a couple of years later with a letter of condolences from his superior officer about how great of a soldier he’d been. By that time, Tony had already been born. 

Fortunately, she had a trust fund, so she could take care of Tony without worrying about needing a job. She knew she’d have to figure out a better backup plan as she wouldn’t live forever and didn’t want her son to struggle if she died. Senior moved in the same circles she did and he had recently lost his soulmate as well.

They seemed like a perfect match. Believing that Senior would take care of her son, Tony, she agreed to marry him when he proposed. While she never regretted marrying Rob, she soon regretted marrying Senior.

It became obvious he was only after her money, but it took her too long to figure this out and he’d wasted most of her money by then. She didn’t have much choice, but to seek her brother’s help in making sure her son was cared for. She hoped that Senior would take care of him, but she knew he would never do so if he wasn’t paid appropriately.

Needless to say her brother hadn’t been happy about the request, but had reluctantly agreed to set aside two small trust funds. The first would be enough to pay Senior a small amount every year to care for Tony until Tony legally became an adult with a small sum of money to cover Tony’s college tuition. The second would be a small trust fund that Tony would inherit at the age of 40 or when he married his soulmate.

After that agreement, she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her brother. He naturally refused to have anything to do with Senior beyond the business arrangement and before she could visit her brother herself, she’d ended up in the car accident that killed her. Not that she would have lived long if she hadn’t been in the car accident. 

No one would come right out and admit it, but Tony was pretty sure that his mother had been dying from cancer. She’d warned Tony after the story to be careful around Senior and that he shouldn’t be trusted. Tony had already known that, having learned that lesson from Senior himself early on in his childhood.

Still, knowing that Senior wasn’t his mother’s soulmate made him feel better even as he struggled to deal with Senior on a daily basis after her death. He always hoped that he’d meet his soulmate like his mother did and that they would rescue him from Senior. It hadn’t happened and now that he was an adult Senior had stopped paying for his schooling despite the money in the trust fund for his college tuition.

He knew money was the reason Senior wanted him to go to the military academy. Senior had connections there that were probably happy to let his son in for free or something. Tony knew he was on his own, now. It would be a while before he qualified for his regular trust fund and he’d have to find a way to finance college on his own unless his uncle somehow came through, but Tony doubted that his uncle cared enough to help given the antagonistic relationship Senior had with his mother’s side of the family.

Tony knew he needed to plan as if he wouldn’t get any money for college. That meant that not only did Tony need to find a college and degree that he liked, but he also needed to find some sort of scholarship. The only thing he’d really excelled at during his time at boarding school was various sports. 

He searched for schools with sports scholarships that he might be able to get and stumbled upon Ohio State. Thinking that a Phys. Ed. major went with a sports scholarship, Tony applied for the sports scholarship and to Ohio State as a Phys. Ed. major. Senior had already applied him to military school despite his protests.

Tony was happy when he got the acceptance letter from Ohio State, especially when it was followed by confirmation that he had received a football and basketball scholarship that gave him a full ride to Ohio State. He could escape Senior and his plans for him finally. Maybe, he didn’t need his soulmate to rescue him, after all.

He still wanted to meet his soulmate and spent a good portion of his time during Freshman year at Ohio State when he wasn’t working on football or basketball looking up anything he could find about NCIS. His soulmark made it obvious that NCIS would feature heavily in his life, though he didn’t know how, yet. He finally found out that NCIS was basically the Navy Cops the same year that a tackle in football injured his knee and forced him to find a career besides pro football.

Since the injury forced him to reconsider professional football for a career and his soulmark had something to do with navy cops, Tony decided to augment his Phys. Ed. degree with a criminal justice minor and see about applying to be a cop somewhere when he graduated. There were NCIS offices all over the world, so even though Tony knew what NCIS was now, he still had no idea where his soulmate actually was. 

He was still young and he still had plenty of time to meet his soulmate, so he wasn’t too worried about it, especially now that he was out from under his father’s thumb. Yeah, he had to pick up a part time job to pay for food and some spending money while he was going through school, but it could be a lot worse. Still he hoped he’d meet his soulmate soon. 

He couldn’t help feeling a bit of jealousy for the people that he knew had already found their soulmates. He’d been steadily flirting his way through most of his classmates, male or female didn’t matter to him, in an attempt to find his soulmate. In the process, he instead found that most of his classmates already knew who their soulmates were. 

He hadn’t expected so many to have found their soulmates. Though, most of them didn’t seem to spend enough time with any one person to actually know who their soulmate was. Tony suspected a number of them to be fronting. 

Still he contented himself with the knowledge that his soulmate was out there somewhere and he just had to find them. He pushed himself to excel at college and soon found himself graduating and looking for a job. He felt pretty confident that if his soulmate was near Ohio State University that they would have already met as he’d been pretty active in extracurriculars and well known to boot, so he looked for opportunities that would allow him to meet new people and get closer to an NCIS office.

He kind of regretted going to Ohio State now as it was quite a ways away from any of the NCIS offices, but it had been the cheapest options due to the scholarship he’d gotten. Due to his limited finances and the fact that Senior kept trying to take what funds he had, claiming that they belonged to him, Tony ended up taking the first job he found. He wanted to be closer to an NCIS office, but he needed an income of some sort and the police department of Peoria had offered him a job upon his graduation from college and successful completion at the Peoria Training Academy.

While he’d have preferred to work elsewhere, it was a job and he didn’t have many offers due to his well publicized knee injury and desire to work in a physical job like a police officer. He hoped that once he had a couple years under his belt, he’d be able to get a job closer to an NCIS office. He hadn’t expected things to go as sour as they went at Peoria, but fortunately he’d been able to talk the Philly Police Department into hiring him before what happened in Peoria became too public. 

At least Philly was closer to an NCIS office, though still not exactly in easy commute distance. After 2 years at Philly, he still was no closer to finding his soulmate despite flirting with everyone he could including some victims that he probably shouldn’t have. One victim grew increasingly attached to him to the point that even if he hadn’t been considering moving on, it would have made him consider it.

He’d managed to find a job with the Baltimore Police Department which was actually within a reasonable driving distance of the Washington Navy Yard where NCIS was headquartered. Tony considered this to be great progress, but he still grew a bit depressed when after a year his soulmark remained the black of a person who hadn’t found their mate. He never expected to tackle his soulmate in Baltimore believing them to be a criminal attempting to escape.

In fact, he didn’t even realize that he’d met his soulmate until after they’d released him for being an undercover NCIS agent. It was later that night that he had a chance to look at his ankle and realize that his NCIS soulmark had turned from it’s normal black to the ocean blue color of someone who has met their mate. Of course, most scientists scoffed at soulmarks like they did the social sciences as the pigmentation change on the skin is the only thing that happened. 

There wasn’t a jolt of electricity or some feeling that you’d met your mate. Because of that a person could go years after first meeting their mate before they were able to determine who their mate actually was. Fortunately for Tony, his soulmark was so particular that he knew that Leroy Jethro Gibbs, the undercover NCIS agent, was the only person he’d met fresh that day that could possibly have caused his mark to turn blue. 

Tony didn’t know if Gibbs knew they were soulmates or not, but when Gibbs offered him a job at NCIS Tony had to take him up on it. It also made his decision not to turn in his partner easier. He couldn’t trust Danny as a partner anymore, but believed deeply in loyalty to your partner and would have found it impossible to continue working with a partner he couldn't trust. If he’d hoped that Gibbs would cut him some slack because they were soulmates, he’d never been more wrong.

In fact if Gibbs knew they were soulmates, Tony thought that he was purposefully taking it harder on him. Not that Tony couldn’t handle it, the happiness from knowing who his soulmate was helped him handle anything Gibbs threw at him including the headslap he’d gotten for considering changing careers. A couple of years later they ended up on the USS Enterprise in the middle of the ocean after a call from Stan Burley and Tony realized that Gibbs really had been taking it easy on him.

He wasn’t sure if he should consider it a win that he and Gibbs were clearly closer and worked better together than Gibbs had worked with Stan or if he should be worried that Gibbs was perhaps taking it too easy on him because of his soulmate status. Tony still wasn’t even sure if Gibbs knew they were soulmates. The man had never once mentioned it and despite spending many hours over at Gibbs’ house, watching Gibbs work on his boat, Tony had never managed to figure out how to bring it up.

In fact, Tony was beginning to suspect that neither of them would have ever mentioned it if it wasn’t for Vance’s interference and decision to split up the team, incidentally sending Tony off to be agent afloat, completely separated from Gibbs by the ocean between them. While neither of them had formally recognized their bond the amount of time they spent together and the trust they had formed with each other had still led to Tony’s soulmark turning a deep green like the pine trees in a forest. Tony didn’t know what Gibbs’ soulmark looked like, but both of them definitely felt the physical effects of their bond protesting their distance from each other.

It wasn’t the purple, commonly considered the fuck like bunnies stage, but it was close enough to make separation physically painful. If they had ever acknowledged the bond and actively worked to deepen it to the pure white color that was believed to indicate the deepest level of bonding, they actually would have been able to handle the separation better. As it was, the bond had only developed to the stage of constantly wanting to be around each other. 

Needless to say the forced separation did not sit well with either of them. Both of them were more on edge. Tony was practically panting at the bit to get back to land. 

Gibbs, on the other hand, grew grouchier and grouchier the more days that passed without Tony and with a team that didn’t know any of his rules that he had to watch carefully to find the mole. Gibbs hadn’t expected to be that affected by the distance between them as he’d spent a good month in Mexico after explosion induced amnesia with no ill effects. He reflected, now, that the bond had still been blue when he was in Mexico. 

Apparently, that next level, the green level, really started the need for a physical connection driving them closer to the purple fuck like bunnies stage. By the time Gibbs managed to get Tony back all he could think about was making a commitment to the man, who he couldn’t live without, for all to see. If it wouldn’t have been entirely inappropriate, he would have proposed to Tony that first time he saw Tony in the office after being agent afloat for so long. 

Still, he never wanted to feel like he felt while Tony was agent afloat again. It was like a piece of him was missing. Determined to make sure Tony would never again leave him, Gibbs offered to give Tony a ride home knowing that Tony’s car was still in storage. Tony accepted with a soft smile. 

It wasn’t long before Tony turned to Gibbs with a frown. “This isn’t the route to your house.”

“I know.” 

“Where are we going?”

“Dinner.”

Tony blinked. “Ok?” Tony drawled, “We could get dinner at your place too.”

“Not tonight.”

Tony eyed Gibbs with a touch of confusion and suspicion. This wasn’t exactly normal behavior for the man who would eat steaks cooked over his fire every night of the week if he could. Still Gibbs was the one driving, so no point in worrying about it, right now.

Tony gasped as Gibbs pulled into the parking lot for one of the glitziest most expensive restaurants in DC. Gibbs even handed the keys to his car to the valet. Holding out his arm to escort Tony in, Gibbs nodded to Tony, “Reservations are waiting.”

“You got reservations here?”

“Yep.”

“What’s going on, Gibbs? You’re not dying, are you?”

Gibbs chuckled. “No. I’m perfectly fine and so are you.”

Gibbs turned to the hostess, “Gibbs.”

“Of course, right this way. We reserved the best seat in the house for you.”

Once Tony and Gibbs were seated and had placed their orders, Tony turned to Gibbs. “Seriously, Gibbs. What’s up?”

Gibbs took one of Tony’s hand in both of his, gently. “I don’t know how you’ve felt these last few months, but I found I don’t want to spend another day without you beside me.”

Tony gasped. “Gibbs? What are you saying?”

“Jethro.” Gibbs smiled softly at Tony, slipping one of his hands into his pants pocket to retrieve the ring box there. “It’s Jethro, Tony. Will you marry me?”

Tony stared gobsmacked at Gibbs. He didn’t know what to say. He’d felt so alone on that boat.

Even the soulmark and the knowledge of who his soulmate was hadn’t been enough to stop the depression from creeping in. He’d been happy just to be back with Gibbs again. He had never imagined that the time apart would have affected Gibbs too.

Gibbs had always seemed so unaffected by everything he did before. Tony literally stared with his mouth dropped open at Gibbs. Finally, Gibbs pulled the ring back.

“It’s ok if you don’t want to say, yes, Tony. I know that I shouldn’t assume you want to marry me just because we’re soulmates.”

“No!” Tony blurted. “I mean yes, I do want to marry you. You just took me by surprise.”

“Having that whole ocean between us made me realize that I never want anything to come between us ever again and if something does I want to know that you know I will be doing my best to get you back by my side no matter what.”

“I love you too, Jethro.”

**Author's Note:**

> Woo! I managed to finish the story that was attempting to block me from continuing to post daily. I had a bunch of other stories lined up behind it already, so there will now be at least 9 stories after this and hopefully I can get some of the next stories written before I run out of the 9 stories (because after these 9 stories I really don't have any written ahead anymore). Wish me luck!
> 
> For any authors that want to chat and/or are looking for a place where they can toss plot ideas around and get input from people, you can come join my discord server that is specifically geared towards writing/encouraging people to write and authors. The invite link is [here](https://discord.gg/HFvwpCq). If you're not an author, but want to chat with me about writing/stories or anything else you are welcome to join. I reserve the right to boot you from my server if all you do is pester me about updates, however. *grin* Really anyone who wants to talk about writing and/or plot ideas for various stories is welcome to join. 
> 
> I've started a new [poll](https://cutsycat.livejournal.com/55450.html) regarding my series and which ones people most want to see continued in place of the Rapprochement series which I have brought to an end for now... 
> 
> Note: The Bishop Entanglement, Crazy Cat Tale, and Pregnant FBI Agent series will be continued no matter what, so you don't need to vote for those. For those who don't have livejournals just leave a comment with your responses. Thanks!
> 
> Also, I'm looking for some writing buddies. Full details are [here](https://cutsycat.livejournal.com/53610.html). It is friends locked, so you'll have to add me as a friend on lj before you can read it.
> 
> Also, Drakonyashka has translated a couple of my works into Russian. [Tutelage](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12378780) and [Imbue](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12378840). Go support them. 
> 
> My 2018 Prompt collection is now open [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/cutsycat_NCIS_Prompts_2018/profile). Just click the sign up link. ;)
> 
> If you are not an ao3 member, you can prompt me [here](http://cutsycat.livejournal.com/50701.html). Please follow the same rules as are listed in the above link. However, because this is a handmade prompt form(that thinks it's a poll), it is considerably more limited than what ao3 provides, so please use the ao3 form if you're an ao3 member. Please note the name option is for a name that I can say this is for so that you know it's for you. Since this is for non ao3 members it won't be true gifts, but you will be mentioned in the notes.
> 
> Feel free to leave feedback here if you think something could be improved(either in the prompt process or the story itself).


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